summary
Article Summary Form
Complete APA Citation:
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Egbert, J., & Jessup, L. (1996, September). Analytic and systemic analyses of computer-supported language learning environments. TESL-EJ, 2(2), 1-24. http://tesl-ej.org/ej06/a1.html .
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Purpose: The purpose of my paper is to establish what kinds of tasks are effective for CALL classrooms.
Category Entry
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RELEVANCE How does the study apply to your manuscript? What will you use it to do?
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This study provides some conditions that tasks should meet to be effective. I will use it to show what past research has found and what the gaps are. |
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PARTICIPANTS Describe the participants generally. |
102 ELL adults in community college. |
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STUDY METHOD What was the method?: _____ ethnography __X___ experiment _____ grounded theory _____ participatory action research _____ phenomenology _____ other Describe the method in one sentence. |
The author used two groups (traditional and cooperative) and gave each an intervention using computers. Analyses included small-space analysis (multi-dimensional scaling) and MANOVA. |
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STUDY PURPOSE State the purpose/topic of the study in one sentence.
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To uncover patterns of students’ perceptions in the 2 environments based on eight constructs |
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DATA SOURCES _____ participant observation _____ interviews _____ historical _____ focus groups __X___ other Describe the data sources used to answer the research question.
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Pre/post survey |
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CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS What did the study conclude? What were the implications of the findings? |
Groups may have process losses during tasks, control can be interpreted in various ways, it’s the students’ perceptions of the task elements that may matter more, previous computer use may matter to their interest in tasks, interest was central to student outcomes.
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WEAKNESSES What did the study fail to do? What were the limitations/delimitations of this study? |
Self report only, didn’t check whether students perceived the actual constructs or understood them, the difference in the tasks didn’t seem to make a difference so there were no real outcomes
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STRENGTHS What did this study accomplish? What did it add to the literature? What do we know now that we didn’t know before this study? What was done well? |
New methodology in CALL (MDS) and theory that can be tested. |
3-4 sentence summary:
In a seminal study, Egbert and Jessup (1996) explored students’ perceptions of two tasks, one drill-based and one content/culture-based. Using multi-dimensional scaling, they used a pretest/post test design to ask 102 community-college ELL students about their perceptions of 8 constructs of the tasks. Results included that student interest, based on how useful the task content and process was, might be a major factor in how they perceived the tasks. The authors note that further research should be done to explore how student interest can be integrated into tasks.
Egbert and Jessup’s (1996) study with community college ELLs used multi-dimensional scaling to find patterns in students’ responses to a survey about two tasks. Their findings suggest that student perceptions of tasks may not be the same as teachers and task designers for a variety of reasons, and that more specific data on student group work in tasks is needed.
One study that does address tasks in the English language classroom is Egbert and Jessup (1996). The researchers explored two different tasks based on 8 constructs of learning environment conditions. Although their study did not result in definitive findings about effective CALL tasks, the theoretical framework used can be useful in future research that explores CALL tasks. Therefore, this framework has been adopted for the current study.